In his book The Bridge to Infinity, Bruce Cathie recounts a story that he says originated in a German magazine. The story tells of astonishing feats of levitation accomplished by priests in a monastery high in the Tibetan Himalayas. Using thirteen drums and six trumpets (or ragdons) set in an arc of ninety degrees in front of a cave sixty-three meters from a large stone slab, the monks were able to levitate five to six slabs of rock per hour, each one-meter wide by one and one-half-meters long, transporting them to a position 500 meters away. If this were indeed a true account, the cave would have been used to amplify and focus the sound.
In the Solomon temple legend, there was also a stone-cutting tool called a Shamir given to Solomon by the angels. This tool is described as a “worm of the earth” whose mere touch was able to cleft rocks. Solomon’s artisans were said to have used this worm to cut stone, wood, or metal simply by being “shown to the Shamir.”
According to the Talmud account, the Shamir was kept wrapped in wool when not in use and stored in a container made of lead. It was said no other vessel could contain the Shamir because it would burst or disintegrate under the worm’s gaze. As the story concludes, the Shamir had lost its potency due to an unexplained “dripping of the honeycomb” that occurred around the time of the destruction of the First Temple of Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BC.22
Even in death, Solomon was associated with serpents. He supposedly died standing upright while leaning upon a cane, collapsing only after an invisible “worm of the Earth” chewed it apart. It is said the worm represented knowledge, now long forgotten, of an invisible force that no substance could withstand. Thus ends the legend of Solomon and his temple built by dragons and angels.
Some have proposed the Shamir was actually a set of solar collectors designed to focus sunlight into an intense beam that was able to cut wood, metal, and stone. In Chris Jordan’s Secrets of the Sun Sects, the solar headdresses of Egyptian pharaohs are interpreted as reflective solar collectors that could have been used to focus sunlight on anything the monarch or demigod wished. To the ancients, the solar collector might have been represented as a “Sivi disc” and symbolized as the “third Eye of Shiva.” In the Vedas, this disc or eye might be the burning Desire (or Kama) that reduces to ashes.
To support his hypothesis, Jordan cites many temples around the world where stone has been vitrified or melted, requiring extremely high temperatures possible in ancient times only with something as powerful as a solar collector. Given the symbolic association of serpents with the Sun and solar deities, it would make sense that Solomon’s so-called Shamir worm could be a solar disc made of mirrors. And given Solomon’s affinity for hexagrams, later adopted in Judaism as the Star of David, this disc could have been designed as a convex honeycomb. Such a solar reflector would have been fully capable of applying many megawatts of solar energy onto a very small point capable of cutting rock to a high precision.
A solar disc like this could well explain the Shamir legend. Wrapping the Sun disc in wool would keep the reflectors from being scratched or accidentally burning someone. Its gaze could have been the focused sunlight, which in time might have overheated and melted into the dripping of the honeycomb. The melting would explain too its loss of potency.
In the final analysis, the description of the Shamir as a “worm of the Earth” might have simply been waves of heat—the solar serpent of light—rippling in the superheated air above the solar disc. Storing the disc in the Ark of the Covenant, it could have been the fearsome weapon described in the Bible used in battle to blind and burn all those who looked upon it. Since the Ark was kept in the Holy of Holies in the temple, the solar disc could have been considered the Eye of Ra, able to capture and control solar serpents to defeat all enemies of the Hebrews.
Alas, the true nature of the Shamir will probably never be known. There has not been a shred of physical evidence found to prove solar collectors existed in ancient times. But if reflectors of one sort or another were used to focus light and direct sound in building temples, it would constitute a working knowledge of wave reflection and resonance in a cavity—two key principles of harmonic science.
Today we reflect and focus laser light to cut metal in manufacturing. Recent sonic experiments have also levitated objects. Such feats in the ancient world would have been powerful magic indeed, worthy of a great Hebrew king—a dragon-serpent of light and enlightenment, the Son of the Sun.
CHAPTER 5
Vedic Temples of the Dragon
At first, I could tell Stuart did not know what to think about my Venus Blueprint analysis of Rosslyn. It was one thing to propose it as the design behind the sacristy tower etching, but quite another to suggest it was used to design the floor plan and acoustics of the entire chapel. To be honest, I was not too sure of the theory myself—that is, until I learned the Rosslyn Magic Ratio was a central feature of ancient harmonic theory.
Out of the blue, I received an email from a retired professor of archeomusicology at Kings College, Cambridge by the name of Leon Crickmore. He had stumbled across my website while searching for “harmonic mythology” and wanted to share with me one of his research papers on Babylonian musical theory. The paper was entitled “The Tonal Systems of Mesopotamia and Ancient Greece: Some Similarities and Differences.”
In reading his paper, I learned that the Babylonians used “Just tuning” for their music based on a standard table of simple fractions and reciprocals. From this they would create various scales by adjusting tuning up or down by a specific interval. Known today as the syntonic comma, this interval is equal to the proportion 81 / 80. The reciprocal of this is then equal to the Rosslyn Magic Ratio subtracted from one, like this:
1 — 80/81 = 0.012345679
In his paper, Professor Crickmore concluded by proposing that the Greek tuning system, known as the Greater Perfect System, was not invented by the Greeks at all but instead derived from the much older Babylonian tonal system, which itself was based on their mathematical tables. He further suggested that the Babylonians adjusted their tuning in order to match their cosmology and that this harmonic theory had been in use in Greece from about 1900 BC up through 400 BC.
Here was hard evidence that advanced harmonic theory is much older than anyone imagines—antedating Pythagoras by at least 1,400 years. Moreover the Babylonians, and probably Sumerians before them, recognized the harmonic qualities of numbers and used them in music to support their religious cosmology. Amazingly, Rosslyn had been designed according to the reciprocal of the syntonic comma used by both the Babylonians and ancient Chinese.
Needless to say, I was very excited to learn of this and told Dr. Crickmore so. I mentioned to him that it supported my hypothesis that the dimensions of Rosslyn chapel had been designed according to an ancient harmonic science, now at least 3,900 years old. While it did not yet confirm an earlier provenance, say in ancient Sumer or prior to the writing of the Rig-Veda, it certainly did identify a harmonic science and related cosmology in Babylonia before the development of Greek music theory.
To get his opinion, I sent the professor my diagram of the Venus Blueprint overlaid onto Rosslyn’s floor plan. From this, I learned that he had spent a fair amount of time in Edinburgh teaching and studying about Rosslyn chapel. Like Stuart and myself, he was quite skeptical at first about my idea that the chapel had been designed using a fractal star. It was not until he had dug around and found a pentagram as one of Rosslyn’s mason symbols that he began to consider the possibility (Fig. 16).
FIGURE 16. Mason symbols found in Rosslyn chapel
This discovery seemed to help him accept the possibility that a pentagram was used somewhere in the design of the chapel, though not necessarily as I had suggested. He felt the many alignments between the Blueprint and Rosslyn floor plan were not enough to prove it was designed according to this one geometric symbol.
Were it not for the Meru tower etching and all of the other Venusian symbols in the chapel, I too would be skeptical. However, I did think the prepo
nderance of evidence weighed in favor of the Hebrew Shekinah Pillar as an ancient fertility symbol for Venus and, through an association with Vedic cosmology, was a strong motive to use the orbital geometry of Venus as a template in the chapel’s design.
What I needed to convince both him and me was a larger context within which the Blueprint could have been used. I needed to find more connections between the Blueprint design and ancient temples and religious symbolisms. I had to understand what these temples were really used for and why harmonically resonant spaces would have been so important to ancient cultures.
The Vedic Hebrews
As the last great sorcerer, Solomon was believed to have the power to summon and control elemental spirits using magical keys. During the Arcadian reconstruction of the Qabala during the Renaissance, an attempt was made to recapture and codify these keys in a grimoire entitled Clavicula Salomonis or The Key of Solomon. In this text are a series of magical spells and symbols from such sources as Agrippa, Paracelsus, and Abano believed to reach as far back as the first century BC. These symbols are mostly composed of circular patterns, ciphers, and annotations that to this day remain little understood.
The best-known example of these symbols is the hexagonal Star of David, but there were many others. Legend has it that Solomon struggled to decide which of his keys was most important, vacillating between the hexagram and pentagram. As cymatic patterns of resonant vibration, both are central to harmonic science and thus the likely reason for his indecision.
We can begin to appreciate Solomon’s quandary by realizing the hexagram represents the resonant explosiveness of three while the pentagram represents the damping containment of five. For Solomon, the hexagram would have symbolized outward masculine energy; whereas the pentagram would have been interpreted as the feminine container that keeps this energy from over-resonating and blowing apart. In this light, the choice of which harmonic symbol to use as a religious icon would have been of great importance, since it aligns its followers with either the material world of masculine energy or the invisible feminine womb of space and time.
This can be illustrated by understanding how cymatic resonance patterns form from interfering harmonic waves on a vibrated surface. For instance, a six-sided hexagon is produced by vibrating powder or sand at a frequency equal to the fifth harmonic partial of the fundamental frequency of a round plate. In this case, a 5:1 harmonic will resonate into the shape of a hexagon or Star of David. In musical terms, this geometry corresponds to a resolved major third in the tonic triad of a major scale, thus equating God with the mediant (or inverse tonic) located a whole step above the Harmonic Center. In this model, God is symbolically looking downward.
On the other hand, a five-sided cymatic figure is produced using the fourth harmonic partial to the fundamental, which is equivalent to playing a double octave on a piano. This double octave is then a whole step below the Harmonic Center, equating God with the tonic fundamental. In this model, God is symbolically looking upward.
Thus the hexagonal and pentagonal geometries are reflections of one another and balance either side of the Harmonic Center. If you were Solomon, which model of God would you choose?
Faced with this unavoidable duality in the physics of resonance, Solomon chose the hexagram as his public icon while reserving the pentagram as his secret symbol of control. God would thus be looking downward on Earth as a hexagram, and Man would be looking upward to heaven as a pentagram.
Perhaps for this reason, the first pentacle in Solomon’s book of keys was a pentagonal figure called Le Grand Pentacule, which he associated with both Mercury and Venus.
Here followeth, howe and after what sorte, Pentacles must be made; wherein all the science of the Kay of Knowledge dependethe.
—CLAVICULA SALOMONIS
Indeed, the first letter “A” in both Phoenician and Hebrew alphabets is a golden triangle taken from such a pentacle. This was named Aleph by the Hebrews to signify the first word and thought. The key to unlocking Solomon’s wisdom then begins with the golden Aleph triangle of a pentacle—not a hexagonal Star of David.
Originating as a fertility cult within the Semite community that lived in Babylonia and worshiped the Baal trinity, the early Hebrew people modeled the Talmud after the Rig-Veda. Solomon was the Son of the Sun, thus the Moonchild and so-called Prince of darkness. Using the Star of David as their masculine icon, the feminine Star of Asherah was then kept as a temple secret and used only by the priests.
As the feminine symbol behind the development of language, knowledge, and religion, the Jewish clergy gradually suppressed the Aleph pentacle while embracing the hexagram. Over the centuries, the Roman Church recast what had once been the most sacred Vedic symbol of spirituality into a symbol of evil and feminine witchcraft, which is still quite evident today in modern films about the occult. In this way, the Great Pentacle was used to disparage paganism and discourage the pursuit of natural knowledge. This was done in spite of the fact that it was the first symbol of Solomon, the great Hebrew king in the Bible (no small irony).
Comparing the Blueprint fractal with Solomon’s first pentacle reveals a likely connection (Fig. 17). From a series of horizontal alignments and angular congruencies, the Great Pentacle and Venus Blueprint appear to be one and the same.
FIGURE 17. The Great Pentacle of Solomon as Blueprint fractal
If a reasonable inference can be made from this comparison, it would appear the Hebrews had knowledge of the rosette orbit of Venus, as represented in the Blueprint fractal, and were aware of Vedic cosmology. Solomon’s harmonic wisdom was surely something he did not invent, originating from even more ancient knowledge such as the Babylonian musical system based on astronomical tables.
The stacked-star technique may well have been common priestly knowledge in the time of Babylon, inspiring the great five-tiered ziggurat temples. Careful observations of Venus over an eight-year period would have been enough to deduce the pentagram stack even in the most ancient of times.
Stacked pentacles could have also been deduced from cymatic vibration experiments. Early Hebrew priests could have reproduced orbital resonance patterns in cymatic experiments, discovering that resonance patterns always enfold their outer pattern inward. From this they could have easily taken the hint to stack pentagrams inward to mimic the orbital geometry of Venus.
No matter how they did it, all paths would have led to the same conclusion—the planets resonated into place like a plate of vibrated sand under the calming influence of Venus. From simple observations and experiments, the Hebrew priests could have confirmed the importance of this orbital geometry in harmonizing the planets and making life on Earth possible. This is the essential discovery of the Rig-Veda and, I believe, the original source for Solomon’s legendary wisdom.
The Vedic Greeks
At the entrance to the sacred mountain of the Acropolis in Athens stands Arios Pagos or Mars Hill. This was the seat of the court of ancient Athens and the birthplace of democracy. Yet few realize that the ideals of democracy—individual liberty, parliamentary laws, and judicial system—were actually modeled after the Greek goddess of wisdom Athena. Beloved by the Athenians, a great temple was built to honor Athena on the summit of the Acropolis. They named this temple the Parthenon to mean the “temple of the virgin goddess.”
Athena first came to the Greeks in the third and second millennia BC as the Egyptian mother goddess Neith. As a personification of the primordial waters of creation, Neith is associated with the goddess Tanit, who was worshipped in North Africa by the early Berber tribes. Like Athena, Tanit was also a sky-dwelling virginal mother goddess and symbol of fertility who had in turn descended from Astarte or Ishtar, the Assyrian and Babylonian goddess of Venus. Thus the Greek Athena is just another name for the Vedic goddess Vena (possibly adapted from A-Vena to Athena), and her temple on the Acropolis is just another version of the sacred mountain of Meru.23
According to Robert Johnson in his book The Parthenon Code: Mankind’s Hi
story in Marble, the Parthenon was designed to portray the Athenian’s religious history through sculptured friezes. These friezes tell the same creation story as the biblical Genesis with one big difference—the serpent Ladon in the Garden of Hesperides actually helps Zeus and Hera (as Adam and Eve) become enlightened rather than deluding and seducing them.
In this way, the Greek garden story is older and much closer to the original Vedic cosmology than the Genesis account. Athena, as the feminine Hesperos or Evening Star, lords over the Tree of Life while Ladon, the asura serpent of Meru, hides and protects its forbidden golden fruit. And since Ladon was always depicted coiled around the Tree of Hesperides, he is yet another personification of the Fibonacci series, a Vedic symbol for enlightenment and ascension to the top of Meru.
I will discuss the full meaning of the Tree and Garden later, but for now the depiction of Ladon as a bearer of enlightenment is consistent with Egyptian and Indian depictions of the uraeus cobra and kundalini serpent. The friezes in the Parthenon are not so much a precursor to the biblical Genesis as they are a depiction of the original celestial fertility story described in the Rig-Veda. The Abrahamic religions received many of their Vedic ideas from Babylon, which in turn received them from Akkadian/Sumerian traditions.
This link then between Athena and Vedic cosmology is an important one because it offers a clue about the design of the Parthenon itself. That is, the famous Temple of Athena may also have been designed using the Venus Blueprint (Fig. 18).
The Venus Blueprint Page 9